[VIRTUAL] PEN Out Loud: Yaa Gyasi with Roxane Gay

Bestselling author Yaa Gyasi joins PEN Out Loud to celebrate the publication of her powerful and multilayered novel, Transcendent Kingdom. In this timely narrative, Gyasi demonstrates her range and ambition in a book that is vastly different from her lauded debut, Homegoing. She will be joined in conversation with bestselling author Roxane Gay to discuss her new novel, which focuses on the life of a family of Ghanaian immigrants in Huntsville, Alabama wrestling with faith, science, race, and the legacy of unmanageable loss.

This digital event will start at 8pm ET / 5pm PT.

Presented in collaboration with Strand Book Store and Scripps Presents.

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ASL interpretive services are provided by ProBono ASL.


Yaa Gyasi headshotYaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She holds a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she held a Dean’s Graduate Research Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn.

Roxane Gay headshotRoxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, Harper’s Bazaar, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women, and New York Times bestselling Hunger: A Memoir of My Body. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel and the editor of Best American Short Stories 2018. She is currently at work on film and television projects, a book of writing advice, an essay collection about television and culture, and a YA novel entitled The Year I Learned Everything.


About Strand Book Store

Located on 12th and Broadway in New York City, the Strand Book Store is a family-owned, iconic literary destination with more than 90 years of history and 18 miles of books to prove it. Its events feature some of today’s most interesting and provocative authors. Its unparalleled inventory of 2.5 million new, used, and rare books and locally designed totes, gifts, and apparel makes it easy and exciting to get lost in the stacks.

About Scripps Presents

Scripps Presents is an electrifying mix of storytellers and artists, policymakers and musicians—and everything in between. Based at Scripps College, Scripps Presents provides a forum the Claremont Colleges and audiences across Southern California to engage with eye-opening, mind-bending, genre-defying tête-à-têtes with the thinkers and doers, writers and performers, whose passions and perspectives are changing the way we see the world.

 

This program is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

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The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the Austin Public Library Foundation, and Magic City Poetry Festival are regional partners for the fall 2020 season of PEN Out Loud.